In the latest issue of Dappled Things , Matthew Alderman interviews Andrew Wilson Smith , one of the “rising generation of classical sculptors”:
Matthew Alderman: What distinguishes traditional art and sculpture from contemporary art and design?
Andrew Wilson Smith: In my mind the idea of tradition incorporates the concept of a contract in which our ancestors, ourselves, and our descendants are obliged to keep one another’s interests in mind as we manipulate our surroundings.
A good example of this contract is found in a stonemasons’ tradition, in which the current generation of masons starts the process of preparing lime-mortar for their sons’ use twenty years in the future, and at the same time make use of the mortar prepared by their own fathers. This understanding of tradition can be applied to all aspects of life, but I can think of at least a few examples of its application in my own life and career as a sculptor. I have had several opportunities over the years to learn artistic technique from masters who gained very little for their pains. The artists who did this for me had received similar gifts in their youth, and I am thus obliged to pass along what I have learned and thereby continue the chain into the future.
Another example will help us distinguish this kind of approach to tradition from the ideas current in the world of contemporary art and design. Modern art movements are disdainful of monuments, and especially a monument to the achievements of an individual. Three things breed this repulsion: the individual being represented is old, dead, and it’s not me! The modernist program is essentially motivated by contemporary culture’s fixation with the new, a dread of mortality, and rampant egotism. When we are confronted with monuments designed along a modernist aesthetic such as the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., or a colossal sculpture of Martin Luther King, Jr., that was proposed but not executed, we are usually left feeling distant and dejected. This happens because we have no way to interpret and internalize the supposedly profound conceptual ideas of the artists who made them.
You can find examples of Smith’s work here .
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